The Better Way to Meet the ENERGY STAR Mandate

Now that President Biden has taken office, policy makers and experts in the energy industry will be focusing on his $2 trillion climate plan. The plan focuses on significantly increasing energy efficiency, with an aim to build new and modern infrastructure and upgrade existing infrastructure to deliver an equitable clean energy future.

Many U.S. municipalities already require that government and commercial entities report energy usage to the EPA on an annual basis to receive an ENERGY STAR score for each building they own. With the heightened focus on combating climate change it’s likely that the ENERGY STAR reporting mandates will expand nationwide. Fortunately, for EnergyCAP users, the application’s interface with ENERGY STAR’s reporting tool—Portfolio Manager (PM)—makes reporting easy.

Interfacing EnergyCAP with your Portfolio Manager account eliminates the need to double-enter your data into EnergyCAP and Portfolio Manager. Also, the data submitted by EnergyCAP to Portfolio Manager is calendarized, which offers multiple benefits.

What is calendarized data? Energy use and cost data presented on a utility bill rarely covers a specific calendar month. Rather, the billing dates usually include portions of two or more months. EnergyCAP calendarizes the data intelligently by allocating the use and cost by day to the appropriate calendar month. The intelligent process uses a statistical linear regression model to allocate weather-sensitive meters based on daily weather data (obtained daily from The Weather Company) and uses straight-line proration for non-weather sensitive meters. The calendarized data benefits energy managers by providing better month-to-month and year-to-year comparisons, and it aids fiscal reporting and budgeting, which are commonly based on complete calendar months.

Submitting calendarized data to Portfolio Manager has many time-saving benefits, including:

Greater transparency and reduced data errors from Portfolio Manager.
Easier to see what months have already been submitted vs. not submitted, and easier to view the status of each month’s data.
Assurance that there are no gaps between bills, or overlapping bills, when clients retrieve their ENERGY STAR scores and metrics.

Configuring your EnergyCAP database to interface with your PM account is very easy to do. If you’re not yet submitting data from EnergyCAP to PM, no problem. We have put together a step-by-step setup guide for EnergyCAP users who…

…are new to PM and need assistance setting up a new PM account and linking it to an EnergyCAP database,

…have an existing PM account who wish to link it to an EnergyCAP database, and

…already have a PM account and need to transfer existing PM data to Version 7.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of submitting your facility energy data to Portfolio Manager, read our eBook, “5 Benefits of ENERGY STAR Benchmarking & How to Multiply Them.”